leaving Cheyenne
by sweetwatersong
Summary: Tie my bones to his back, head our faces to the west / We'll ride the prairie that we love the best... Wild West/zombie!AU. Clint/Natasha.
1. leaving Cheyenne

**leaving Cheyenne**  
rating: pg  
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff  
warnings: angst, implied character death

summary: Tie my bones to his back, head our faces to the west / We'll ride the prairie that we love the best... Wild West/zombie!AU.

author's note: Title and summary from _I'm Leaving Cheyenne_. And yes, this is another unexpected combo AU... because why not?

_leaving Cheyenne_

Who did you send to fight the undead? When the well was running dry and the preacher's fear had turned all hands against any help, when the cows were starving and the plague was knocking at your door, who did you send to fight the undead?

She coughed, the telltale rasp almost hidden by the sound of the approaching horde, and checked her shotgun.

"Somehow I didn't see dying like this when I began riding with you."

"Personally, I'd prefer a death bed over a heap of crappy rocks, one of which is digging into my spleen, by the way, but if this is all we get..." Clint didn't finish the sentence, fingers running over the fletching on the few arrows he had left.

"We had enough," Natasha said firmly, lowering the gun to lay it across her outstretched legs. She looked at Clint, as if daring him to disagree; as if asking with him to say she was right. He left the last tattered arrow alone and looked back at her, caught in the rush of war. Any second lost was a second they were closer to dying, and they had only seconds now – but something changed in his shoulders, releasing the tension down through his arms and his fingers, up through his eyes.

"Yeah," he replied, and if they hadn't been about to die the tone in his voice might have been fondness. "Yeah, we did."

What they didn't say, what they wouldn't let themselves say, was that she would have enough too, Lord willing and the creek don't rise; that the little girl held in not unfriendly arms somewhere inside the stockade would have the chance to grow up, that someday the story of her mother and father would be one of heroes and not outsiders sentenced to die from the dead or the plague. They drew their arrows and cocked their guns, hands steady and breathing easy despite the rasping, and with the taste of dust in their mouths they waited for Death to come and get them.

Who do you send to fight the undead? The ones who are dead men walking.

_end_


	2. alt epilogue

**alt. epilogue, or: a piece of Pete's buckskin chaps  
**rating: pg  
characters: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanoff, daughter

author's note: This is not the way the original _leaving Cheyenne_ ends. In fact, I hadn't really given a great deal of thought to what happened after the original story until Bee wished that there was some way for Clint and Natasha to have survived. So think of this as an alternate ending to an AU story; the perfect combination of strange.

author's note II: Title from _Outlaw Pete_ by Bruce Springsteen, the basis for this.

_alt. epilogue, or: a piece of Pete's buckskin chaps_

A young woman straightened in the slow water of the river, her fingers combing through her tangled brown curls. She kept her head tipped as she worked through the knots, green-eyed gaze drifting over the familiar grassy landscape. Eleven years here, raised by a mother not her own, watching the town grow and break down the stockades, sprawling out onto the surrounding land. Eleven years of watching and waiting, accepting rough-spun dresses and the gruff obligations of almost strangers, keeping her eyes on the rocks and the rising hills and the horizon.

She waded back to shore, toweling herself off as she continued to scan her surroundings, and was just tucking her shirt into her trousers when two horses appeared on the crest of the hill. They halted there, the riders on their backs waiting motionless in the afternoon sun, and a sharp, satisfied smile spread across her lips.

She slipped her knife into the sheath wrapped around the saddle horn, checked the girth with a two-fingered tug, and mounted her buckskin in a swift motion. Turning the mare's head to the west, she sent her cantering towards the waiting pair.

She had kept her promise; they had kept theirs.

x

_The wind tugged at strands of her hair, staunchly ignored by the young girl sitting on top of the rise. She could have been studying the town below but for the crease between her eyebrows and the intensity of her gaze, fixed upon the rocky patch thirty lengths beyond the stockade._

_They had said that her parents had died there, or at the very least become another set of mindless walkers. But she had heard the drunken comments at the saloon, slipping into the smoke-filled room and hovering in the shadows. Luke had slurred through his protestation that though twenty or so corpses had been sprawled over the ground when the town finally went to check two days later, them damn outsiders hadn't been among them. And their horses had been gone, too, good horses with tack he had had half an eye on, and... And then he had been silenced by a hiss from shifty Saul, who hadn't spotted her but had less drink in him than the broken cowboy. There had been other murmurs too, over the months she had prowled the edges of the room or lingered under cracked windows, driven to learn the fate of her parents by a desperate need that made a willing child into a spook._

_One way or another, her parents had walked out of that killing ground, as groaning demons or on their own two feet. Forget the plague; her parents were too strong for that, were too strong to be brought down by a measly cough - She caught herself hugging her knees, eyes stinging, and took a gulping breath, forcing herself to let go._

_Her parents were alive; they had to be. She wasn't going to stay here with these people who had let them die, these cowards who had comforted her with cold hands and averted eyes. All she had to do was steal little John's pony, which would be easy - the sturdy pony liked her enough already, and she could hustle a saddle blanket out of Micheal's things if no one was looking - and some supplies beside the jerky and canteen she already had hidden away, and then -_

_Movement caught her eye, down where the woods curved out to open space before the stockade. She frowned, watching the two riders emerge and stop a few lengths away from the barren rocks. There was something..._

_And before her mind could finish processing that thought she was up and flying down the hill, stumbling to her knees and pushing herself up again without any regard for her safety. The only thing that mattered in that moment, that had ever mattered, was the two beloved people waiting down below._

x

Eleven years later, she was finally free to ride beside her parents. The plague had subdued the walker virus, but they had refused to risk exposing her to themselves and, by default, both of those dangers as long as she was still a child.

Well, it was her eighteenth birthday, and she was a child no longer.

"Ready to ride?" Her father asked, amusement showing through his solemn facade as her mother reached out, kissing her lightly on the forehead. She opened her eyes, meeting the gaze so very much like her own, and turned to look at him.

"Race you."

And she won, in every way that mattered.

_fin_


End file.
